Warning: This article contains foul language. (Sort of.)
The first time I heard the word C-word used outside of its more familiar context as a gross and misogynistic swear word, a friend of mine was describing rectangular wire-rimmed eyeglasses. You know, the smallish frames typically worn by hot girls in ’90s rom-coms’ pre-makeover montage. Or, as my friend called them, “cunty little glasses.”
Though cunty would not have been my first choice of descriptor, I immediately knew what she meant. The glasses themselves were objectively rather dull, utilitarian in design and purposely plain. But when paired with a teensy crop top, or maybe micro-shorts à la Bella Hadid, they take on an ironic quality. Hadid, for example, is attractive not because of—but rather in spite of—her eyewear choice. She’s in on the joke.
“Cunt is sort of a synonym of camp, sort of ironically cool,” Adam Aleksic, also known as Etymology Nerd on social media, tells Glamour. Of course, that wasn’t always the case, at least not in the mainstream.
However, once I began listening for it, I heard cunt, meaning “camp,” everywhere—on social media, among my female and queer friends, on podcasts, and even emblazoned on kitschy homeware, a successor to “Live, Laugh, Love” merchandise of yore. What had once been an absolutely off-limits, taboo offense was not just okay, but cool. The first time cunty slipped out of my own mouth, I started and glanced around the room for feedback. My friends laughed. They knew what I meant. But my 70-year-old mom? She would’ve been aghast.
“I feel like you kind of have to be in the sauce a little bit to really understand what’s going on,” says Aleksic, 24. “And to look at it from a linguistics perspective, you have to be doom-scrolling a little bit.”
So how did we get here? And what is the true origin of cunt as we use it in 2025? To answer these questions, Glamour spoke with Aleksic, whose new book, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, hits shelves this summer, about all things cunt.
When did you notice that cunt was becoming more popular in American slang?
First of all, the reclaimed use of the word cunt in 2025 is from the 1980s ballroom scene in New York City, which is predominantly a Black and Latino queer space—drag culture—organized into different houses. They had a bunch of localized slang that was shared across these houses. And it used to connect to each other, to forge a linguistic identity separate from the straight white norms of the English language. That’s why this language was being created, as a form of identity.
It started in ballroom spaces, transferring from particularly Black and Latino gay men, to gay men in general throughout the ’90s and the early ’00s. Around the 2010s, it really started to pick up traction through RuPaul’s Drag Race, and then later on shows like HBO’s Legendary. By that time we’re also getting into the social media era where these words are being used online by queer people.
There’s a phenomenon called context collapse, where other people hear people using this word, don’t know that it’s not meant for them, and then replicate the word. So social media sort of accelerated the normalization, or neutralization, of this word.
What did the word mean to the ballroom scene? It was more literal, right?
It starts with “serving cunt” or “giving cunt,” which implies that you are giving femininity.
It’s also popular slang in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Do you think that those communities, since we’re culturally more global now, have impacted its use in the US?
Totally. Social context is super important. It has this hugely negative association in America, particularly because of how it’s been used to target marginalized communities. But in Australia, cunt is used as a general word of endearment sometimes; it’s less negative, so there’s less of that social context.
It’s being used on shows like The Boys, so you could say Australian media is seeping into American culture; maybe that also serves to normalize the word. I definitely think that could play a part. You can’t separate media from the equation. We build our perceptions of words from the media we consume.
As a millennial, I can say the word was definitely taboo for me growing up. You’re 24—what was your relationship to the word?
I personally learned it along with all the other curse words. When I was growing up, maybe in 2010, it was a word I knew I should not be using because it definitely had this negative connotation.
I only really started to notice it being reclaimed by my gay friends around the late 2010s and the early 2020s. Again, this coincides with social media. This is when it really starts to be picked up in the [new] context.
It had been used in this reclaimed sense since at least the 1980s, according to my research, in the ballroom space, but it took a while for it to travel out of that space and into the mainstream. Language change always starts with a niche community creating a word and then it blowing up outside of that community.
I think it’s common for people to experience a little bit of possessiveness, like “This is our community, we built this slang,” especially when it’s a marginalized community creating the language.
Well, there are a few things going on with reclamation. And one of them absolutely is an intentional reclamation. In linguistics, it’s called reappropriation appropriation, just meaning the use of a word in a new context. It can be intentional. You can use it still in a negative capacity.
However, the F-slur is still used by many in the gay community, and the word dyke is used by lesbians, but it’s understood that it should only be used by these people. Kind of like the N-word should only be used by Black people—that’s a form of stigma exploitation, where by using it and retaining it only for in-group use, you’re acknowledging that the in-group has been historically discriminated against. So that’s part of the context.
I feel like sometimes there’s a knee-jerk reaction to be like, “Oh well, calling someone a cunt is like calling somebody a dick.” Can you explain why that is or is not a parallel?
I guess that would be an argument by counterfeminists. But you can’t separate use from context, right? Sure, they both describe genitalia, but one is contextually applied as a negative insult against a class of people historically marginalized, and the word dick is not. So there’s a clear difference in how the word’s being used and, also, the social connotations that it carries in our culture. But outside of that use, when you say “giving cunt” or “serving cunt,” you kind of abstract it a level.
One outcome of stigma exploitation is value reversal, showing that something negative can become positive. We had that with the word queer, which used to be an insult, and that was reclaimed by the group to become positive.
However, I think on an individual level, people might not be using the words for this grand sociological planning purpose, they use it because it’s campy. And what is camp? I think that’s a super-important thing if we want to understand how cunt got reclaimed, because the 1980s ballroom scene and the subsequent ways that it evolved through shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race are inherently campy.
Camp is this aesthetic of ironic juxtaposition, taking something that might be shocking in its incongruity, and then using it to create a cool or humorous effect. And so by some sociologists, camp is thought to be this form of dark humor serving as a coping mechanism to historical marginalization. In other cases, it’s just funny and people like using it because that’s what their sociological in-group does. But I don’t think we can separate cunt from the history of camp.
Are there any other words you can think of that have had a similar reclamation?
In feminist circles, a lot of people will use slut with a positive connotation. If we look at art history, the terms Impressionist or Fauvist, those are names of art movements that originally were negative labels attached by art critics that the artists then reappropriated for their own use. So this is just a process used by any kind of in-group that feels like they’ve been targeted.
How would you define the way that it’s most often used today?
Sort of as a synonym of camp, sort of as a way of saying “ironically cool or campy.” In my book, Algospeak, I talk about how it’s become really big in K-pop communities on Twitter and TikTok specifically, where they’ll talk about their favorite idols giving cunt or serving cunt. And these K-pop fans had nothing to do with the original ballroom spaces in the 1980s, but they’ve used it for their own in-group language.
But when the K-pop fans are talking about their idols giving cunt, they’re talking about expressing coolness or some campy expression of power. Less so about the original ballroom sense of, “you’re displaying femininity in an extravagant way.”
I almost think of it as kind of diva-esque, which falls into the category of camp.
I think when we have this context collapse, which starts on social media, where people see other people using a word, they don’t understand that it’s part of the vernacular of an in-group, they then replicate the word, and a bit of the meaning is diluted. And that kind of contributes to perhaps the neutralization of cunt that we’re seeing. There are other people using it in not that original sense.
Do you think social media has sped up the appropriation and reappropriation processes?
The social in-group use of cunt collapses because you get a video on your For You Page that you think is for you—because that’s the implication; it’s in the phrase, For YouPage—but it wasn’t actually targeted towards you.
When a creator makes a video, they never actually think about individual audiences as much as they might have a general demographic in mind, but then the algorithm reinterprets that message and sends it to whoever they want to send it to. And now you as the viewer personally resonate with it, and even think that the creator is speaking to you, and then you feel more empowered to personally replicate the word, even if you don’t understand the actual context. And that’s how we collapse the original connotation of giving empowered femininity, and now it’s just like something vaguely cool or exaggerated.
The post When Did We All Get So Comfortable Saying the C-Word? appeared first on Glamour.
